“What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers…
Let’s go, my poet,let’s dawnand singin a gray tattered world.I shall pour forth my sun,and you—your own,in verse.”— Vladimir Mayakovsky, An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky In A Summer Cottage We look at the world through our own lens. It’s relatively easy to be optimistic about the future when you aren’t facing a violent…
“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to…
“Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority… When you’re gone, your work shows who you were. Not your intentions. Not what you took in. Only what you put out.” — Derek Sivers, How to Live “When you ship, you silence the lizard brain….
“You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.” — Epictetus, The Enchiridion Do you ever wonder why the Stoics are more popular than…
The stamina of an old, long-noble race in the eyebrows’ heavy arches. In the mild blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child and, here and there, humility—not a fool’s, but feminine: the look of one who serves. The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight, composed, yet not unwilling to speak out when necessary. The…
“Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual…
“All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.” – John Ruskin The great thing about writing every morning is that feeling of creating something out of nothing. Reinforcing long term habits you once told yourself you ought to have with a little discipline. Discovering new things and figuring out a bit of yourself one post…
Plymouth, Massachusetts might not be the oldest European settlement in the United States, but you can safely say it’s where England got its foothold in America. They might have landed in Provincetown first, hit a few places along the Cape Cod coast as they looked for a better place to settle, and maybe they would…
“In an age of network tools… knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant…
